Grimly surveying a country she described as a tinderbox, our columnist Michelle Goldberg noted over the weekend that the protesters in Minneapolis had faced “a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country’s gun-toting anti-lockdown activists.” |
It’s a scenario I’ve wondered about, and maybe you have, too: What if the protesters in the streets of America’s cities had adopted the tactics of the anti-lockdown agitators? Would they have gotten results faster? Instead of calling them thugs, would President Trump have called them “very good people,” as he did the heavily armed white protesters in Michigan? |
There’s an illuminating precedent, as you may know: On May 2, 1967, about two dozen members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, carrying loaded shotguns and pistols, walked onto the grounds of the State Capitol in Sacramento, Calif. |
They strolled past a group of eighth-graders gathered for a picnic lunch with California’s Republican governor, a former actor named Ronald Reagan. |
“The students stopped and stared in amazement as the Black Panthers marched right by,” wrote Adam Winkler in his history “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.” You can see snippets of video of the incident here and here, but I recommend watching Stanley Nelson Jr.’s absorbing documentary, “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution,” which composes a rich narrative from interviews and archived footage. |
The Panthers made their way into the Capitol building, up the steps and into the visitors gallery. There they stood with their guns, quietly listening to the proceedings before security escorted them out. No shot was fired; no law was broken. |
Why were they there? To protest gun control measures that members of the assembly, and Reagan, were eager to see passed. Why the Republican interest in gun control? Because Huey Newton, a founder of the Panthers, had learned in classes at San Francisco Law School that under California law you could carry a gun in public, as long as it was visible. |
Armed Panthers had begun tailing police through the streets of Oakland. “When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice,” Winkler wrote. He quoted Newton as saying that with “weapons in our hands, we were no longer their subjects but their equals.” |
When he reached the top of the Capitol steps that day in 1967, Bobby Seale, the Panthers’ other founder, issued a prepared statement. He said the proposed legislation was “aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people.” The time had come, he continued, “for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” |
That same day, Reagan declared, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” |
He also said, “I don’t think loaded guns is the way to solve a problem that ought to be solved between people of good will, and anyone who would approve of this kind of demonstration must be out of their mind.” |
The legislation passed, with a new provision prohibiting anyone but police from bringing a loaded gun into the Capitol. Carrying a loaded gun on a California street became punishable by up to five years in prison. |
Today, the party of Reagan advocates a right to carry a concealed gun in public, while black Americans — who have flocked to their own gun association since Trump was elected — continue to struggle to be treated as equal by the police. |
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